It is well known by the skilled person that many services are available to users and that those users are often required to carry out some transaction prior to gaining access to those services. For example sports events or recreation events are attended by people who require tickets to access an arena or auditorium. Likewise users can obtain goods/items from a merchant point of sale but often only after paying for the goods/items. In this respect the term “service” will be understood to broadly cover any goods or services which a person may desire, require or be provided with. The term also will be understood to cover the provision of services and/or goods without the need for a prospective user to carry out some prior transaction, for example the provision of complimentary services.
In order to access these services a potential user of the service is often first supplied with a ticket. Conventionally this ticket will be in the form of a receipt, a voucher, a credit card slip or other and will be printed on a piece of paper, card, plastic or the like. Provision of such a ticket can be a time consuming process and such tickets are prone to being lost. In addition it is often necessary for a user to queue prior to obtaining the service to hand over the ticket at the point of sale or supply.
The Internet offers access to many sites over the world wide web (WWW) at which a user may carry out a transaction with a merchant to purchase or in other ways obtain a service. As a result of the transaction the user is provided with a ticket to access the service.
Various user equipment (UE) such as computers (fixed or portable), mobile telephones, personal data assistants or organisers and so on are also known to the skilled person and can be used to access the internet to obtain services. Mobile user equipment referred to as a mobile station can be defined as a means that is capable of communication via a wireless interface with another device such as a base station of a mobile telecommunication network or any other station. Such a mobile user equipment can be adapted for voice, text message or data communication via the wireless interface.
Mobile user equipment is rapidly evolving into more than a mere wireless telephone. Rather it is transforming into a personal trusted device (PTD) with the ability to provide a wide variety of services such as banking, payments, ticketing, and secure access based operations to a user. The result is a thriving mobile e-commerce market. A mobile electronic transaction (MeT) initiative has been set up to try to introduce standards for mobile phone functionality for carrying out mobile e-commerce. The MeT framework includes a requirement for the provision of secure mobile electronic transactions between a first party such as a user of the mobile user equipment (ME) and a second party such as a merchant offering services.
A user of the mobile user equipment may be provided with an electronic ticket (e-ticket) which is in the form of a data entity stored in the user equipment or in a device accessible by the user equipment. When a user of the user equipment wishes to access/obtain a service for which they have an e-ticket, they signal this via a user interface (UI) on the user equipment. The signal is transmitted to a device at a point of sale where the user can thereafter be provided with the service. Use of such an e-ticket obviates the requirement for a paper version and thus overcomes some of the aforementioned problems. However where more than one e-ticket is accessible to the user of the user equipment it has in the past been necessary to identify each e-ticket to be used separately one after another. This is a time consuming process. This is illustrated in FIG. 5 which illustrates how a mobile station 1 can communicate with a point of sale 35. Once the service and e-ticket (to enable access to that service) has been identified, the point of sale 35 signals to the mobile station. Thereafter a user may transmit e-tickets from the mobile station but only one at a time via separate signals (52, 53, 54, 55 for an example of the transmission of four e-tickets). This is very time consuming.
In addition a problem sometimes occurs when less than all of the e-tickets can be used at a particular time (for example when an event is full) so that only some of the users wishing to access a service can do so. This can potentially leave some users with no access to the service. For groups of users wishing to access a service together this is a particular problem.